Post-vernacular Musics

Creative Research into Post–vernacular Musics (PVM) is a project based in ICMuS that responds to current strands in music making that develop new, experimental or exploratory approaches to musics once considered ‘vernacular’. It seems that distinctions such as popular and classical continue an opposition that is neither consistent nor particularly productive. There are musicians who fall by default into ‘popular’ music, whose music is not all that ‘popular’, and similarly ‘classical’ music that has a huge audience.

Post–vernacular identifies the notion that a cultural practice can originate as a ‘vernacular’ practice (folk, pop, worksong, Muzak) but can develop beyond its original vernacular position into, ‘something else’ (a loose enough term to avoid prescribing what the nature of that development might be). This seems a useful way, for the present moment, to designate a lot of contemporary creative musical practices, without having to get tangled up in the pop-classical binarism which is a tired argument and not a terribly productive one for contemporary practitioners.

Much contemporary electronica, improvised musics, free jazz, post-pop, leftfield dancefloor, anti-folk, breakcore, industrial noise, and so on could be considered under the terms of the PVM project, depending upon the extent to which they push the boundaries of their own genre categorisation, to be postvernacular musical practices.

The term post–vernacular has mostly been used in Jewish cultural studies to talk about changes in the status and use of Yiddish. Formerly an almost exclusively vernacular language, most literature and learning being written in Hebrew, Yiddish began to be used as a literary language in response to the decimation of vernacular speakers, and the devastation of European Jewish culture following the Holocaust. This specific nuancing of the meaning of the post–vernacular is not intended to be referenced in the application of the term to musical production, but the idea of a transformation in practice, social context and function does carry over.

The PVM project actively seeks to encourage creative practice in this hugely diverse field - composition, improvisation, performance and interconnections of all three, and to provide a forum of peer support, linked with visiting artists-in-residence for an initial three-year period. Alongside this, more scholarly research is encouraged informed by critical and cultural theory, to enrich the ‘research environment’ and establish dialogues between theory and practice in a (relatively new) emergent field.

Further enquiries should be directed in the first instance to the director of the project, Bennett Hogg.

email: bennett.hogg@ncl.ac.uk

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PVM project postal address:

c/o ICMuS/SACS
Armstrong Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU